Switch - Chip Heath [103]
If the right Path can turn a jerk into a saint, then the right Path can also turn a change enemy into an ally.
11
Keep the Switch Going
1.
“A long journey starts with a single step.” As clichés go, that’s pretty wise.
But you know what else starts with a single step? An ill-conceived amble that you abandon after a few minutes.
So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn’t guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?
The first thing to do is recognize and celebrate that first step. Something you’ve done has worked. You’ve directed the Rider, you’ve motivated the Elephant, you’ve shaped the Path—and now your team is moving, or you’re moving. When you spot movement, you’ve got to reinforce it. On this front, we can take inspiration from a rather unlikely source: trainers of exotic animals.
The writer Amy Sutherland studied animal trainers who teach dolphins to jump through hoops and monkeys to ride skate boards. These are very, very long journeys indeed. What do you do, in the first hour of the first day, to teach a monkey how to ride a skateboard?
The answer doesn’t involve punishment. Animal trainers rarely use punishment these days. You can punish an elephant only so many times before you wind up as a splinter. Instead, trainers set a behavioral destination and then use “approximations,” meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination. For example, in the first hour of the first day of training, the future skateboarding monkey gets a chunk of mango for not freaking out when the trainer puts the board in his cage. Later, he gets mango for touching the board, then for sitting on it, then for letting the trainer push him back and forth on it. Mango, mango, mango. Hundreds of sessions later, you’ve got a mango-bloated monkey ready to skate a half-pipe.
As Amy Sutherland studied the exotic-animal trainers, she had an epiphany: She wondered what would happen if she used these techniques on that “stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.” Inspired by the idea, she wrote a hilarious New York Times article on her attempts to train her husband. The article, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” became the most e-mailed article on the Times website in 2006, and it led to a book on the same topic.
Frustrated by her husband’s various pecadilloes, Sutherland began to use approximations with him: “You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.” And Scott, basking in the appreciation, began to change.
This approach contrasts with much of the thinking on improving relationships at work. For instance, you probably have been asked to take a personality test or a “work style” test for a job. The idea is that if you understand your colleagues’ “types,” you’ll all get along better. And some people may find the knowledge of types useful. But notice that this sounds like Fundamental Attribution Error thinking. To develop better relationships, you don’t need to know whether your colleague is a Navigator or a Pleaser or a Passive-Aggressive Chieftain. You just need to notice and reinforce your colleague’s positive behaviors—as Sutherland did with her husband—and trust that your colleague will do the same with you. After all, advice about aligning styles and expectations can’t be the answer to everything. A trainer in California taught six elephants to stand in a line and urinate on command, and they hadn’t even completed a Myers-Briggs.
Reinforcement is the secret to getting past the first step of your long journey and on to the second, third,